Its been quite some time since my last post. I’ve been pretty busy with work, which is why I haven’t been contributing as much, but that is changing.

I committed a masked version of gcc-4.4.0 to the tree last night. Feel free to unmask it and test. If you run into anything, please file a bug and let us know. It is by no means meant for general consumption yet, and I’ll be adding a use flag to enable graphite later on tonight.

So, I’m no longer using Ubuntu on any of my computers at home (okay, its still on one box, but I don’t really use that one and will reformat it when I get the chance). It was fun while it lasted, but some things started to annoy me and I could not deal with it anymore. So, what bothered me? Here’s a short list:

How bugs get fixed and pushed out. So, what does this mean exactly? Take for example this: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/psycopg2/+bug/108067. This bug alone caused me great headaches at work since the package is completely useless on my 64bit installation. Not a big deal for one package, but if that is how they are going to handle getting fixes out, I’m not going to be too happy.

I like being on the bleeding edge. There are lots of cool things in Ubuntu, and getting stuff to work is extremely easy (most of the time), but the turnaround time on getting new and exciting things is 6 months.

The overall community. Yes, Ubuntu is easy, so the community that you have is not as technical as I’m used to. Yea yea, go ahead and say Gentoo is full of ricers (they are just a very very vocal minority), but there are certainly people that know more about how things work using Gentoo, so its a different atmosphere, and I like it.

Only a few things really, but I just got fed up and decided to switch back to what I know and am used to.

So, I’m back to using Gentoo now and slowly starting to look at bug reports again and trying to help where I can. Am I going to try and become a developer again? Who knows, I’m seeing how I like being involved again and take it from there.

So, I have set up my new website. Its using Wordpress now, and it was pretty easy to get it all up and going how I wanted. Since my last post I’ve switched over to Ubuntu and I’m loving it. Setting everything up for how I want things is incredibly easy, and I haven’t really had to go and mess with things to make them work (they just do). I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon and seeing how they have improved things.

Now that I’ve gotten used to the entire work thing, I’m starting to find time to involve myself in coding in my spare time. I used to be absolutely spent after I got home from work, but I’m left wanting to do more constructive things after finishing whatever I have to do at work. Hopefully in the near future I’ll have time to talk about some tools I’ve found to be incredibly useful and projects that I’m working on. Until that time…

So, I've been thinking recently about switching to another distro so I can get involved with the development community again. The question is which should I try? I've been leaning towards Fedora since I've heard good things about the community over there, and Redhat was my first distro that I seriously used. The other option with a nice community that sticks out is Ubuntu. I don't know many people that use Ubuntu though, so I don't have much feedback on the community.

I'm downloading the Fedora CDs right now to install on an extra computer I have so I can play around with Yum and see how I like it. I may do the same with Ubuntu, but probably not if I like how Fedora works. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try? Did I miss one that maybe I should look into?

So, I got my overlay listed in Layman (thanks wrobel). I have some stuff in there for gcc, vim, and anything else I care about. If anyone is actually using the overlay, I'd love to know :) Also let me know if anything is broken, or of any bugs you find. If you want an ebuild for an app, and you think I might be interested in it as well, also let me know and maybe I'll write it up.

Its nice to see that Advogato is still around. Hopefully it
will recognize me as a trusted user again soon so I can
syndicate items from my blog (which I don't update nearly
enough).

In recent news, I have graduated from Stevens Tech and now I'm
working as a software developer at Vonage. Its a great place
to work at and I've been learning a lot. My primary
development work has been using Ruby on Rails, which is an
absolute pleasure to work with.

Hopefully I'll have enough spare time soon to be able to
work on some open source projects again. I haven't had
nearly enough time to work on anything else except things
for work. I'd love to work on some stuff for Ubuntu, or for
some of the Ruby projects that I have been taking advantage of.

This has been something I've been curious about for awhile now. How many people actually use an IDS? If you do, which do you use, and why? Do you actually go in and check all of the data it collects and react to it, or do you have an intrusion prevention system that handles it for you? If you don't use an IDS, why don't you?

I ask because I'd like to hear from people what they find lacking, or what they love, about existing IDS systems. IDMEF presents a very nice way to combine a whole bunch of different systems to make it into one nice big system, much like Prelude does now. Prelude is the only system of its type that I've been able to find though, and I'd love to know what some of the improvements people would like to see, since a project doing something similar to Prelude has been on the backburner of my mind for quite some time now.

If your journal is on Advogato or Planet Larry (which this journal is syndicated on now, thanks beandog), then I'll most likely see your response, but if you want, shoot me an email as well. My email can be found on my Advogato page.

It has been quite some time since I blogged last. I haven't been up to too much coding-wise since I left Gentoo. Work has been keeping me quite busy. I've been interning there over the summer and will most likely stay on part time over the upcoming semester at school. I'll be graduating with my BS in CS in December (finally, it feels like forever), and I have no idea what I'll be doing after that.

Since I still do use and love Gentoo, I feel like I should comment on how I would be handling the xorg 7.1 problem that currently seems to be a big issue. How I see it, it is pretty plain and simple...xorg-7.1 breaks packages that depend upon it, which breaks one of the rules that everyone should be following when marking a package stable. Sure, they are binary drivers, and we have no control over them, but if they are staying in the tree, then everyone should be supporting them the best that they can. There is no excuse to knowingly break users' systems. The open source drivers are not a replacement for the closed source ones since they do not offer the same features. I find it quite sad how some people don't seem to care that users are going to be running into major problems if they depend upon closed source drivers. I'm sure lots of people will comment on the fact that closed source drivers do not belong in an open source operating system, but some of us are not as strict in our beliefs and will use what gets the job done.

I think they are all cool. I'll probably remove a few after they start to piss me off, but I think most of them are useful, or don't really make the browsing experience any worse. Anyone else have recommendations for some good extensions?